The Boko Haram suicide bomber who survived her deadly mission

When Halime was a little girl, she used to accompany her father to go fishing on Lake Chad. After hours spent plying its narrow, reed-fringed channels, they would gather enough fish to sell at the lakeside market in the nearby town of Bol.

At Christmas last year, Halime, now 19, returned by canoe to the same market. Only this time, she had a bomb strapped around her waist.

Chadian civil defence volunteers spotted her and seven other girls as they approached, prompting two to detonate their suicide belts. Halime had no time to trigger hers: the blasts ignited by her neighbours blew off her legs and threw her into the water.

The girls were among an army of suicide bombers – possibly in the hundreds - mobilised by Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group, to inflict bloodshed throughout the region.

Multiple witnesses and security sources told The Telegraph in Chad last week that Boko Haram fighters appear drugged, and its commanders have been using Tramadol, a veterinary pain killer, to dull the senses of its foot soldiers and make them pliant.

Lying on a filthy mattress in a stifling hospital room in Bol, Halime had few answers to give.

She was emaciated and her skin pockmarked with sores and scars. “Are you police?” she asked. “I'm hungry. I need soap to wash myself.”

Speaking in a high-pitched whisper, she told of growing up in a Chadian village on the edge of the lake where Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon meet. “I come from a small village near the border (with Nigeria),” said Halime, who declined to give her full name. “My father was a fisherman, I used to go on the boat with him to market. I used to work in the fields.”

When asked how she lost her legs and what she understood about Boko Haram, Halime turned her face away and closed her eyes.

Children playing at the Unicef school in Dar Es Salaam refugee camp, Baga Sola, ChadCredit:
Aislinn Laing/The Telegraph

“She is talking now, it’s a big improvement,” said Joel Konayel Belem, who works for a Chadian government organisation trying to reunite families who were scattered throughout the region while trying to escape Boko Haram. “When she first arrived she would smear herself with faeces so no one would come near her.”

Mr Belem said that Halime probably left her village voluntarily to join Boko Haram, but was drugged to carry out her suicide mission. “We are trying to get her father to take her home but at first he rejected her,” he said. “Everyone is frightened of being associated with those people.”

Claiming to act in the name of Allah and in pursuit of Sharia law, Boko Haram’s jihadists have burnt women and children alive in huts, slit the throats of fighting-age men, bombed Muslims going to mosque or merchants in their markets and blithely gunned down whole communities.

In 2014, they were ranked as the deadliest terrorist group in the world, killing over 6,600 people, compared with the 6,100 who died at the hands of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), according to the Global Terrorism Database.

The death toll is only one measure of the suffering the group has generated: women have been abducted and repeatedly raped, their children indoctrinated to kill their parents and “drink their blood”, witnesses say.

As many as 2.5 million people have fled the ravages of Boko Haram for displacement camps in Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

People who once had homes, close-knit communities, herds of animals and fields of crops have been reduced to lives of dependency in the camps, nursing psychological and physical scars.

At least 4,500 people fled across Lake Chad to the town of Baga Sola where today they live in a tented camp named Dar-es-Salaam, meaning “Place of Peace”.

Watch | Inside Boko Haram's 'caliphate' in Nigeria

01:00

Even here, they are not entirely safe. Boko Haram’s suicide bombers, like Halime, have begun attacking the Chadian capital N’Djamena and the lake region, killing those who have already fled the group’s massacres in Nigeria.

Last October, 52 people were killed when two women and a child attacked Baga Sola’s market. The little girl was escorted there by her father, reportedly a Chadian man who was close to the local governor and regular informant of the town’s civilian defence force.

Umaru al-Haji Gorba, a refugee from Nigeria, was standing across the road when the first attacker detonated her bomb and witnessed the ensuing carnage. “We fled Boko Haram there and now they come to find us here as well,” he said. “We feel our safety from them is not guaranteed anywhere.”

Inside the market, Ndgara Salta Bintu, an 11-year-old girl, was a few feet away from one of the bombers and remembers seeing her body rise in the air with the blast. “When I woke up there were people lying around me and running away. I was scared and tried to get up to run too but I couldn’t,” she said.

Ndgara Salta Bintu lost her arm after a suicide attack on Bagasola market in October last yearCredit:
Badre Bahaji/UNICEF Chad

Ndgara’s right arm had to be amputated and her left arm suffered extensive nerve damage. She was one of about several children left with life-changing injuries by that single attack, rendering their lives all but pointless in impoverished communities where their worth is often measured by their ability to herd animals or tend crops..

Dr Jean Luboya, the regional chief of the UN children’s charity Unicef, said the drugged and bewildered child bombers, like Halime, were as much victims as those they maimed.

“Many are unaware of what will happen, and even those children who knowingly set off explosives attached to their bodies are too young to be able to make rational decisions about such actions - especially after a process of indoctrination,” he said.

Nigeria’s military leaders have been blamed for allowing Boko Haram to flourish through the corrupt siphoning off of money meant to tackle their nation’s greatest scourge.

By contrast, the Chadian army is seen as experienced, disciplined and well-funded by its authoritarian government. At present, the largest concentration of its forces are in the lake region, where they have imposed a state of emergency and shut all but the main routes to civilian traffic.

The islands that stud Lake Chad and have been used by Boko Haram as training grounds and hide-outs have been forcibly evacuated and the border with Nigeria essentially closed.

Thousands of Chadians have lost their homes along with Nigerians, the once thriving trading hub of Baga Sola has become a ghost town save for soldiers and humanitarian workers and food prices have surged, creating hardship and hunger for everyone.

Dimouya Souadebelocal, the state's representative in Baga Sola, said security had improved however. “We have chased these people out,” he said. “In the villages towards Bol, we have apprehended many people with explosives.”

Nowhere is the military presence more evident than in Baga Sola market itself, where patrols of soldiers bristling with weapons pass watchful store-holders every three minutes.

Everyone surrounding the bomb site lost someone they loved in the attack and trade in the market is down by at least 50 per cent because, traders say, people are too afraid to come.

Watch | Escape from Boko Haram: what the survivors witnessed

04:40

As a result, they could be forgiven for condemning the government’s decision to open its doors to refugees and join the fight against the world’s worst terror group.

Instead, Mbodou Mahamat, 40, who lost his eight-year-old daughter in the blast, drew nods of approval as he told how if he could, he too would take up a weapon in the fight against Boko Haram.

“I am so disgusted by these people – in the age of the Prophet Mohammed these things did not happen, it is not Islam,” he said.

“The Nigerian government let them get stronger but now they are in our territory, it is our fight and we must deal with it."

Mbodou Mahamat, 40, who lost his eight-year-old daughter when a bomb exploded just metres behind his stall in Baga Sola marketCredit:
Aislinn Laing/The Telegraph